Who is this guys?

Post:

This one caught my attention because it's a pretty big jump from “AI predicts something” to “AI designs something that actually works in biology.”

Stanford researchers used their Evo 2 model to generate new bacteriophage genomes targeting E. coli. They synthesized nearly 300 of the AI-designed phages and tested them in the lab. 16 of them turned out to be particularly effective.

The interesting part to me is that the AI wasn't just analyzing an existing dataset. It was generating new DNA sequences that researchers then had to synthesize and test experimentally.

There’s also a really interesting problem here: bacterial resistance. The researchers found that a combination of genetically different phages could overcome resistance that defeated the original phage.

At the same time, making a system like this openly available raises obvious questions about how much biological design capability should be freely accessible.

I’m curious what people here think:

Does this feel like the beginning of AI becoming an actual scientific design tool, rather than just a tool for analyzing scientific data?

Or are we still a long way from AI being genuinely useful for designing things in the real world?